Xamarin

So as promised here’s a post with more detail on the iOS designer provider that I presented as part of my talk at fsharpX 2017 The talk is entitled Expanding the Horizons of Mobile Development

So today was my last day at Xamarin.

For any of you that are aware of the newly updated Xamarin Web site, you may have seen the following: Objective-C was ahead of its time 30 years ago. C# is ahead of its time today. Anything you can do in Objective-C or Java, you can do in C# with Xamarin—usually more succinctly and with fewer bugs.

With the release of Xamarin 3 there is a swathe of new features to the platform, but obviously the most important one is obviously F# support is now included by default in Xamarin Studio so there is no escape from the awesomeness of F#!

Over the last year a lot of work has been done on the F# addin for Xamarin Studio. Lots of great new features have been added and a lot of bugs have been squashed. I want to talk a bit about whats been happening and the evolution of the F# addin.

Only a quick post this week. Last time we looked at SpriteKit and how to add some particle emmiters to simulate a star-field and exhaust on a spaceship, this time lets look at adding some touch based input to move the spaceship around.

I have been meaning to write this post for quite a while now. Since the first announcement of the iOS7 beta I immediately saw the list of new API’s and SpriteKit caught my eye straight away. I only managed to get time to briefly look over the API and saw that is wasn’t the usual trashy API with a million method overloads, internal mutation sucker punch type thing. It seems to be very declarative and intuitive, which makes for a nice change.

In the last post we left at the point where everything was running fine and dandy on the Simulator. So what happens if we compile for the real hardware? Lets change the active configuration to Debug|iPhone and hit build, what do we get?

MonoTouch and F# that would be a cool duo right? Well let me explain what needs to be done and why to get this pair working together. I heard rumours a while ago that F# and MonoTouch would not play together nicely because of limitations in the ahead of time compilation (AOT). So I thought I would either prove or disprove this with some concentrated hacking. How hard can it be?